[XeTeX] Hyperref \hyperlink and \hypertarget not working with accented characters

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 10:24:11AM +0000, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:

> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 
> >No, it won't be that easy. Syntax (string) in links is in
> >AdobeStandardEncoding and some of these characters are not valid in
> >UTF-8.
> 
> OK.  But could a PDF reader not use the same detection algorithm
> as (say) the Microsoft C# Compiler -- "No BOM : ASCII; BOM : UTF-8" ?

Example: Destination names in PDF are just byte strings.
Thus you could put arbitrary rubbisch in there. The string
is used as id label to identify a destination/anchor.

Regarding hyperref: an anchor name has similar restrictions
as a \label name. Letters and digits are safe. The rest
might work or does not. (There is some support for
babel shorthands, thus they should work.)

Regarding XeTeX: AFAIK, it's asymmetriacl it can read
many encodings, but can't write arbitrary bytes.

Anchor names go into the .aux file, are reread from there
and go into the .pdf file. It would be fatal if the
names changes (active characters, reencodings, ...) or
all uses of that name must undergo the same changes.

If the OP needs funny stuff as labels, because they are
generated automatically, then the it can be made safe
by converting to hex strings (package pdfescape
and others), for example.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek